YouTube Heroes is messy attempt at community moderation

Google launched a community moderation program called YouTube heroes . The program rewards users for replying to questions in the YouTube Help forum, mass flagging videos, adding subtitles, and moderating comments. YouTube content creators are not happy with the approach of these new measures. It is an open secret that the content policy of YouTube is widely violated, particularly the policies on violent or explicit content. This means that those rewarded for flagging content can potentially cause trouble for content creators, especially artists or those who use adult language in their videos.

The YouTube Heroes video has comments disabled. From the time it was uploaded on September 20, there are less than 5,000 likes but more than 300,000 dislikes. Moderation should be its own reward, rewarding moderation with more moderating powers introduces an unnecessary special class into the community. It makes flagging and reporting inappropriate content the problem of YouTube Heroes only, and regular users will be less involved in the process of moderation. Moreover, gamification of moderation can mean aggressive and unreasonable moderation, where users abuse the system just to win at the YouTube Heroes game.

YouTube comments are a massive problem, for both off colour remarks and flame wars. Currently, channel owners can assign moderators, but these moderators do not have the tools they need to moderate the content. Decisions taken by channel moderators are queued up for the channel owners to validate. This puts the load of taking the final call on the channel creators anyway, with no meaningful power to the moderators picked by the channel owners. Instead of giving global powers to YouTube Heroes to moderate comments across all channels, it makes more sense to give these tools to the moderators picked by the channel owners.

Another question raised by the program is who moderates the moderators. YouTube is clearly getting the community involved in the policing process of the site. While it is a good idea to let the community moderate itself, the specific implementation is flawed. Just like the channel owners have to take the final call on the decisions of the moderators they pick, YouTube staff will have to take the final call on actions by YouTube Heroes, over say mass flagged videos. With the gamification of moderation, YouTube staff can easily be buried under a pile of actions that need approvals.

Creating a trusted group of moderators with more powers can be implemented in a more reasonable way. The community stands to benefit more if the choice of who to trust with moderation is given to the channel owners. This would create small clusters of active and engaged users for each channel, instead of a squad of YouTube Heroes who can operate across all channels. Many of the tools available to the YouTube heroes can just as easily be introduced to everyone, without there being an incentive to unlock more tools.